Elysium
by Frostbite Panda
Summary: She had thought him dead for what could’ve been eternities contained in mere moments and here he is shuffling within the dusty dimness of his apartment. 'This Is Not Happening' AU.


**Elysium**

_Written By: _Frostbite Panda

_Edited By: _November

**Spoilers: **This Is Not Happening, and basically the entire show

**Discliamer:** I do not pretend that I have the abilities to create characters as good as Mulder and Scully. I don't own them. Or anything else. Pathetic.

* * *

"It's Mulder."

After months of stumbling in the dark, fingers just barely brushing his sleeve, before he was ripped from her again. His absence as immutable as this miracle presence in her womb.

She felt herself go hollow. She willed herself not to sway. "What?"

Skinner looked as if he might dissolve into hopeless weeping. The hope in her expression was too much in the face of what he already knew. It made the blood run cold in her veins, the wind her lungs grow brittle and hot.

Her first thought was to run. To put heel to earth and get to him as fast as possible. Her eyes, her hands, her soul craved for him like a physical burn. An ashen fire thirsting for oxygen.

But she stopped herself, feeling clothes lined. Skinner and Reyes reacted to her every move like gob smacked marionettes in the uncaring corner of her eye. She turned haltingly, before rushing back through the door and grabbing Jeremiah Smith by the arm, yanking him up with strength that was not her own. She shuffled, ran and shoved him, her brutal haste born from incomprehensible panic. A quickly dying light of salvation. Skinner and Reyes jogged just behind them, questions and protestations ringing dully within the swirl of furious blood in her ears.

Mulder would need help. He would need healing. And the only person who could possibly help him was the man she now gripped by the elbow, her nails white in his jacket.

"Where is he?" She bellowed as Doggett came forward. She saw through a haze of too many emotions a circle of people around a body draped with a tarp. A corpse. A pronouncement of death. Her frigid blood ignited and she suddenly felt enraged. A wolf brimming with bloodlust at the sight of her fallen mate. She would rend flesh and bone, taste the salt of blood in her mouth before limping off into the wild thicket and would wane like the moon she sang to every night.

Vision wobbling and bile rising, she brushed quickly past Doggett and let go of Smith, breaking into a jog and falling beside the body. Her partner. "No…" She felt the heated, steamy wave of hysteria rising within her, building enough momentum to wash over her head and spin her feet away from the earth. Leaving her blind and breathless.

She ran numb fingers over his scarred, beloved face. Her hand almost burned at the cold touch. Dry ice. The liquid Nitrogen of death.

She was chanting his name and words of denial. Her mind was buzzing somewhere over her body, no longer able to withstand the real world. She didn't even know she was speaking.

Sounds were muted and her vision narrow. It was only the gray of dead skin, the grit of dust and taste of sorrow. The angles of his face and the line of his jaw… the precious geometry she had begun to resign herself to never see again.

Smith was shaking her by the shoulder. He could've been doing it for days and she never noticed.

"Please! Agent Scully, we haven't much time! We may already be too late. Get these other people out of here!"

She blinked, the words taking eternities to process in her over taxed brain. She felt a hot crash of irrational anger at herself for her hesitation. The seconds slipped by like irrevocable souls lost to an undertow.

Finally, her lungs were burning with frantic orders. "Everyone get the hell out of here!" There was some protest. She couldn't believe it. They wanted to get the body out of here. There was a wash of light overhead. Far off voices of despair and fear and a crash of distant panic. She felt a vague sense of the apocalypse smashing around her. The swirl of hundreds pinned onto her and this man. An extraterrestrial healer. How had it all come to this? "I don't give a damn, get the hell out of here or this man will DIE!" She could've cut stone with her eyes and burned forest with her voice.

Everyone started filing away, Skinner and Doggett hesitating. Scully looked desperately to Smith as he threw the tarp off Mulder. Nude and pearly skinned within the charged light of the moon. She had the irrational urge to cover his nakedness with her own.

"You can really save him?" She really couldn't understand how she had retained the ability to speak. Her voice sounded unearthly in her ears. Tight and small from being forced past a lump of fading hope in her chest.

He shook his head. "It might be too late."

Tears flooded her vision. His words held the power of a holy man. She felt it now. She bit her lip until her tears receded. She would not do this now. She felt impossibly dizzy. Too light to stay by his side.

"Take both his hands. Talk to him. We need more than just my abilities to save him now," He paused to look at her and she felt oddly naked. Mere iridescence. "You may want to tell him."

She suppressed a shudder took both of his icy hands into her small, clammy palms. She suddenly felt as though she could keep him tethered to the world with her grip.

"Mulder?" She started as Smith circled them, studying Mulder's body, pockmarked and silver-edged. "Mulder… It's me, Scully," She stopped, hating herself for letting her voice waver. She used to talk to him in her dreams. "Mulder, we're going to help you get better, okay? Jeremiah Smith is here and he's going to heal you and everything is going to be all right," The syllables of his name carried a new weight. They seemed more precious than ever before. "You have to come back, Mulder. I… I need you." An unordinary confession. Telling only in its simple truth and the sudden calm that overcame her at its utterance. Smith's eyes flashed and he twitched with interest. He put palms on Mulder's brow contemplatively. "I… Mulder there's someone else working the X Files. You need to get up so you can kick his ass," She couldn't believe she was making a joke. She must be channeling him. She couldn't help but think what his reaction would be if she told him that she brought an alien to heal him and had a moment of a spiritual conduit. The thought warmed her like a slug of strong whiskey and she felt it seep into his own cold skin.

"Good…" Smith mumbled and took his palms from Mulder's head to his chest.

She licked her lips, taking a great breath. She felt larger than herself. A mooring of life and existence. "Mulder I've missed you so much," Her voice was now a whisper. Quiet in great and terrible love. She lifted a hand and brushed his hair in sudden breathtaking familiarity. "We have so much to live for." The last statement was spoken in a mere breath. A white-hot piece of herself only Mulder could ever possess.

"I'm getting a heartbeat," The words were foreign. The language of miracles and divinities. Of seeing the Virgin in a pool of water and saints being stained with the marks of Christ.

She couldn't say anything. The strange serenity that had blanketed her had been shattered and she had to tell herself to breathe. If she opened her mouth, her insides would fly away like freedom-crazed birds. She felt her hand being lifted from his warming grip and placed atop his chest. The thrum of barely realized life fluttered under her palm like a trapped moth, craving the light of the world.

* * *

He feels infinite. All boundless void and ill-defined edges. He stretches beyond his own perception, pushed to extremity. His blood and breath simmer somewhere he cannot place and there is a voice he cannot name. He feels the first, exhilarating twitch of familiar reality. He senses without sight or sound the slide of bodies and the heat of red hair. The grit of powdery salt on his lips and the hum of highway under his feet. The fullness of stolen nights and glances and the tactile memory of thin sheets and rough carpet. Too few moments of realized bliss and the hunger of death. The white-blue glow of a reborn ship, thieving him from something so much more than himself.

He feels the world inside him. She is a sun and he remnants and ruins of an ancient explosion. Dust and noble gases and radiation. Formless and shiftless and phosphorescent. The laws of nature reside within her and he feels himself gather and solidify at her whim. He feels weight and the tug of gravity. She is blazing and glorious and older than light. Dark matter and star dust. He relinquishes a world where life and death are interchangeable and succumbs to her elemental pull. The magic of the stars contained within her breath and beauty.

He suddenly has arms and legs, fingers and a mouth. He discovers that he has eyes as the perfect black fractures before him to the dim glow of night and heart monitors. His vision swims, blurs, and sharpens, his eyes feeling heavy. He finds that they are the only things he can possibly control. He feels a warm puff on the inside of his elbow and a weight on his arm.

He remembers calling for her. He can scarcely remember a time within his trek through the universe where he didn't wish for her, wanting to will himself next to her. Perhaps it had worked.

He wanted desperately to say her name, move… anything to stir her from her slumber and hear her voice and watch her face. Feel the cool of her dawn-sky gaze. Only then would he feel alive.

His limbs were inert and heavy as lead. His voice was lost within a rough mesh that seemed to have taken up residence in his throat. He managed to bend some of his fingers into the tickly ends of her hair.

Even this subtle shift in the atmosphere brought her to wakefulness. He felt her tense and slowly lift herself from his arm. Her movements were tenuous and careful… as if she had awoken countless times before now only to find him in the same state she had left him when she went to sleep.

Lost and boundless in the unrecognizable sci-fi whirrs and green halogen glow of an alien spacecraft had made the small curve of her nose, the pouty arch of her lips and the vastness of her eyes the trinkets of fine art that had been too long lost to war and fire.

Her face crumpled in disbelieving grief - joy that defied comprehension. Despite the protest, his lips curved in a grimacing smile. "Mulder?"

He moved his thumb over a small knuckle. Tight over his fingers in a gesture of self-assurance. "Oh God," She sputtered through a throat tight with sobs and pressed her hot face to his chest. He burned to hold her.

She gathered herself for a moment and brought her eyes back to his. She brushed cool fingers at his hairline and he closed his eyes in the rush of familiarity. "Mulder… you're alive," She shook her head, "You're alive and you're here." She seemed to be telling herself more than him.

He managed to turn his head towards her, but still couldn't produce any words. She opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. "Go back to sleep, Mulder. You need… you need your rest. I'll be here, I promise," She seemed reluctant to relinquish him after so long.

He managed to move his lips over the syllables of her name before succumbing to the exhaustion of seeing her again.

* * *

She had thought him dead for what could've been eternities contained in mere moments and here he is shuffling within the dusty dimness of his apartment. She closes the door and leans against it for momentary support as his spiky hair and large nose are cast in a thin line of brilliance within his living room.

"It seems different," He says in observation, but she guesses that it's more to fill the silence.

She flattens clammy palms against the door and pushes herself from it, walking into the living room and vaguely imaging a future here.

She had told him all she thought he could handle at the hospital. The search for him, his healing, her new partner (She couldn't suppress an eye roll at the flash of jealousy and line of consternation on his face as she said this). He had nodded, taking in most of it in stride and making jokes when he could. She suspected that he was having a tough time placing himself in this new world.

And she hadn't told him about the mingled life that breathed inside her.

"It's clean," She said, grinning at him and he smiled back, nodding.

"Ah… well that would make sense." He walked to his fish tank, bending as low as his sore body would allow to take inventory. "I'm missing a molly."

She nodded. "Yeah," And silence reigned, tension thickening and suffocating.

She suddenly felt faint. She had planned to tell him when she brought him home, but the prospect of it made her shaky. As hard as she tried, she couldn't imagine what his reaction would be. The thought frightened her.

She flopped heavily on the battered leather couch and put her head in her hands, trying not to remember beers and bad movies. Breath on her flushed neck and the stumble of fingers over pearly buttons.

She felt the cushions shift and Mulder was sitting next to her. The lack of thigh against thigh strange and telling. "Listen… Scully," He said quietly, "I don't mean to upset you I'm just trying to-"

"Mulder, I'm pregnant." She had meant to silence his apologies so she could prepare something profound to say to ready him for her news, but everything she had formulated, postulated and pondered had evaporated at the quick glance of his pained face. She didn't know if she was comforting him or punishing him with this sudden admission.

She bravely kept her expression blank as he stared at her, allowing the words to pass through him several times before registering. "Scully…" He began, measuring his words like a careful psychologist. She wouldn't blame him for thinking she was crazy. She had been turned into a slight basket case these past few weeks. Sleeping in his bed with his shirt clutched to her face. Stroking the lines of his name in a Formica nameplate. Speaking in dreams and believing in shape shifting alien bounty hunters. "You're what?"

Her emotional guard fell like paper in the gale of his gaze. She fought her tears and words were tumbling from her. Ungraceful and raw in the emotion they contained. "Skinner came to see me… in the hospital," She took a great, shaking breath. Trying to recount without the pain of memory. "I had… I had fainted and been put in the hospital," She paused for a moment, feeling him shift imperceptibly closer.

"They ran some tests to see what was wrong. We thought it was my cancer, Mulder…" Hot, liquid salt was streaming down her face now and her expression changed from pained to adoration, awe and ever-present disbelief, as she looked at his face, vivid and real in the yellow glow of his apartment. "I… I made them run the tests three more times, but they were all the same. Skinner came and… God Mulder…" He was completely and utterly shell shocked. Unnaturally still and breath rattling in his lungs. He stared at her with wide, questioning eyes, a glimmer of subtle need piercing her more deeply than imaginable. "It was like to get one miracle I had to lose another and…" She sniffed, tearing her eyes from his for a moment. She felt a bone-crushing wave of love drown her for a moment. She suddenly felt more alive than ever and wished that Mulder could hear the swirl of the ocean inside her. She returned her gaze, face now set in grim fierceness, cheeks wet. "…And I couldn't accept that. And now I have both…" Her words were lost in a sob. She looked down, the realization too much to ponder with the stare of a thousand worlds and memories stripping her bare. She shook her head slowly, a watery smile spreading over her face. "And now I have both."

There was a long moment of silence and stillness in which she sniffed and he sat like stone. He had somehow taken her hand and had threaded fingers through her hair at some point. When and how didn't matter. He was touching her. She gasped and looked up at him as his hand, large and dangerously familiar, slid from her hair and covered the still flat plane of her belly. His eyes were alive with every emotion of man and she felt her breath stolen away in the presence of it. This is what Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson wrote of but could never truly capture. An apocrypha of love and humanity.

"It's yours Mulder," She whispered, voice holding the power of gods and demons. Knowing what he wanted to hear. The truth he sought for in her eyes. "That I am sure of."

He dipped his head in an instant of gathering strength and his hand, his wonderful, adoring hand went up to cup her face, the pad of his thumb danced over the plane of her cheek bone. "Ours…" He breathed before crushing her to him in a smash of divine impossibility.

* * *

The drab white of his ceiling was thrown into life and color with chasing shadows and sunlight. He lay within in the cool rumples of his sheets and breathed. The ability of how to absorb feelings as large and raw as the ones that pressed upon him now had not yet been created by god or man and he felt flat and static in the face of it. All he knew for certain was that Scully was making tea in his kitchen and he could smell the faint scent of her in his linens. Leftover from their short months of imperfect bliss or from late-night wanders to his empty apartment, he couldn't say and couldn't yet ponder.

She was at the door, holding two steaming, mismatched mugs and girded by the orange light of evening. Her red hair was alight and pale skin illuminated. She halted, as if surprised to see him there.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked at her, drinking in her small frame. The sweep of her hips. She had endured so much. Too much. Had seen him frayed and screaming for her in a padded cell. Had arched above him in the most intimate and beautiful way. Had let him into her apartment at odd hours of the night. Had yelled at and thrown water into the faces of fellow F.B.I. agents and flown to Alaska and sailed to the Bermuda Triangle. Had inscribed his name on the pearly shores of Africa and subscribed the impossible skill of an alien healer. Had harnessed the power of the cosmos to save him.

And now she stood before him, a man who by all accounts should be in jail, the loony bin, six feet in the cold earth and she carried his miracle child.

He didn't know whether to run away in fear or fall on his knees in awe—in humility.

Instead, he offered her a small grin and she smiled, brilliantly and he felt his chest ache in unerring disbelief that he should make her so happy. She sat next to him and passed him a mug and he took it gratefully. She still had sticky tracks on her face that she couldn't wash away from a tearful embrace in his living room. He suspected that some would be there forever.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.

He shook his head, eyes on the basketball on the floor. He couldn't remember if that's where he had left it. He suddenly couldn't find the strength to speak under the enormity of everything around him. The miracle of him sitting there, thigh brushing his private goddess. He didn't know what to do with it all. It made him clumsy and uncertain of the certainties in his life. Breathing and eating. Waking and sleeping. Scully and dusty files in a former copier closet in the basement. He couldn't think of what it all meant now.

She shifted and made to get up. "You've been through a lot, Mulder. I'll… you need some time—"

Her words were cut off by his hand on her wrist, the grip tighter than he meant it to be in his sudden panic. She was his light, his sound and taste. His perception and sense of reality. He felt a vague sense of guilt of making her his entirety, but he couldn't stop it. If she left, he would be left in dark and silence, sifting through shadows and unable to think and feel and love.

He took her mug from her loose fingers and placed it next to his on the nightstand, hand moving without thought or preamble. He felt white-hot heat rise in his body as he arched his neck to meet her. He was nothing but light and she a vortex of inescapable gravity. A collapsed star.

They drank from each other, their arousal instantaneous and sharp. His hands, mouth, body thirsted for her with a hunger he never thought he'd know. That he _should _know. It seemed unnatural. An anomaly. He felt her, warm and soft-angled and pliant against him and felt the sting of the surreal. This panhuman wanted him as much as he wanted her as she pushed her hips against his own.

He smoothed his palms up her back and felt her warm moan in his mouth.

* * *

He was thinner, and he had proven that he was not at full strength.

But she had been sated nonetheless and she traced imaginary scars by moonlight. Up and down the gully in his chest, pockmarks of restraint on his wrists and face. She had let her tongue lap the roof of his mouth, trying to feel a drill mark. The lack of scar tissue made it seem like a long and terrible dream.

She dropped a kiss on his arm, the one that provided her with the safety of his embrace and the pillow of his shoulder. This man who had seen the wonders of god inscribed on a ship. Who saw the mechanizations of the brain and human thought and chased her to Antarctica. Whose beautiful mind had been hunted and dissected. Who brought her an impossible technology to cure the incurable. Who had come to her from the brink of death in a dream and who had given her a child she shouldn't have.

She spread the tear that fell on his collarbone with a thumb and was not sure how she would be able to contain all the things he was able to make her feel.

"I never thought I'd have children," He mumbled into the night-lit room. She didn't know he had been awake.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, not knowing what to say. Not sure if she would ever know what to say.

"My boys can swim," He said, opening his eyes with that grin she knew so well and missed so much.

She laughed. A wild, bright sound mixed with her silent tears and she kissed him, making him hers forever.

* * *

"She runs through the streets

With eyes painted red

Under the black belly of cloud in the rain

In through in doorway

She brings me white, golden pearls

Stolen from the sea

She is raging

She is raging

And a storm blows up in her eyes"

_- Running To A Standstill_ U2

* * *

_**Author's Notes:** I always thought that it was slightly ridiculous that Scully left Smith at the compound. Come _on_, writers. She's smarter than that!_

_And, as always, a huge thanks goes out to my beta, November._


End file.
